Words are symbols that assume a shared memory. The memory I now want to set down is mine alone; all those who share it have died. The mystics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird that is all birds, a sun that is all the stars and the sun, a jug of wine, a garden, or the sexual act. Of these metaphors, none will serve me for that long, joyous night, which left us, tired out and happy, at the borders of dawn.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing. A writer can conceive a fable, Kipling acknowledged, without grasping its moral. He must be true to his imagination, and not to the mere ephemeral circumstances of a supposed ‘reality’.

— Jorge Luis Borges

The years pass and I’ve told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it’s only my words I’m remembering.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I still hold two images of the ranch – the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopaedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard’s skin.

— Jorge Luis Borges

My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.

— Jorge Luis Borges

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Science is a finite sphere that grows in infinite space; each new expansion makes it include a larger zone of the unknown, but the unknown is inexhaustable.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

— Jorge Luis Borges

To be not a man, but the projection of another man’s dream- what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!

— Jorge Luis Borges

What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?

— Jorge Luis Borges

The acts of madmen exceed the previsions of the sane.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now... And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Being with you or without you is how I measure my time.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.

— Jorge Luis Borges

The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are – who would deny it? – marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being.

— Jorge Luis Borges

It will be said that the conclusion no doubt preceded its “proofs.” But what man can content himself with seeking out proofs for a thing that not even he himself believes in, or whose teaching he cares naught for?

— Jorge Luis Borges

And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien – poetry is, as we will see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.

— Jorge Luis Borges
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